The 21 new poems at the start of Wish by Maggie Brookes-Butt are a grandparent’s love song, addressed to her descendants. They are designed to be read when the children grow up.
The volume of new and selected poems is written in a simple style that wears its heart on its sleeve but it is often delightful and deeper than it looks.
The main theme of the book is love, for the writer’s family and grand-children. It captures the almost disinterested pleasure we can take as a grandparent in a small, developing life without the itching anxiety and self-doubt of being a young parent.
This is the beginning of a poem about the moment when an infant discovers their individual identity:
ME
What lightning strike
of insight has told you
the curly-haired girl
in the mirror is ‘me?’
when nobody calls you that
and everyone also
claims to be ‘me?’
It’s a characteristic thought twist on a common theme, and it’s worked out with elegant feeling through the rest of the poem. What will happen when the infant becomes a teenager, and maybe desperate to erase her distinctive personality and blend in with her peers?
Modern poetry is often difficult to follow, challenging and obscure. Sometimes that’s the point – emotional reality tends to be ambivalent and impossible to pin down. We have a taste for the offbeat and surreal view.
In contrast, this author is one who uses words in their everyday meanings, not squeezing language into unnatural shapes. But she avoids cliches and provides enough slant viewpoints to convey an experience that’s felt and alive.
Grandparent’s Love Song
I loved this description of a toddler learning to walk along the edge of a sofa,
and when the support runs out, you thrust one arm
into the air, not looking up, expecting an adult grasp,
and your certainty that another hand will always
be there to clasp threatens to break my heart;
Then there’s the main theme of the book, explored in a sliding metaphor that holds its grip till the very end.
LOVE SEEPS IN
Love seeps in and fills me up
as water overruns a sinking ship,
snaking down corridors
coating them with silver,
bubbling through cracks and crevices
thundering up staircases,
claiming everything.
It’s hard not to see an image of The Titanic, and to feel the double-edge of this emotion that offers both bliss and terror.
These latest poems in the collection reflect a calm reached after the author’s earlier work like Lipstick, on women’s defiant reaction to the Bosnian and Afghan wars. And her series on German-speakers imprisoned in Alexandra Palace in the Second World War, and her sequence on photographs of refugees.
If I had a criticism of these poems, it would be that sometimes the appeal for humans to take the hard decisions needed to combat global warming is over-direct, with a tang of green propaganda.
On the other hand, what is an older poet meant to feel about our legacy to the next generations? I think one element of good writing is that it conveys a generous intention, a desire to inspire hope and a sense of reconciliation in the reader. It’s not the only kind of poetry. But it’s often at the heart of a poet’s vision. And even at this late stage in English literature, writing like this can be simple and good.
Wish by Maggie Brookes-Butt £14.99 from Greenwich Exchangehttps://www.maggiebutt.co.uk/wishlanding